pupils there, and if I were compelled to
subsist upon my stipend, I should fare but
ill; for the annual balance is actually against
me in the sum of three pounds three shillings
and fourpence. I have, certainly, the honour
of receiving occasional letters from the
Reverend High and Mitey and from her Ladyship,
and I am allowed the use of the kitchen-
stuff; so that the loss of the three pounds
three shillings and fourpence may be said to
be made up to me in vegetables and
condescension. Still, I do not think that it is I
who deserve the title of "Bloated Churchman,"
which I understand is very freely applied to
me by the evening company, at the Standard
of Freedom, over the way.

MINERALS THAT WE EAT.

IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER THE FIRST.

THESE are times in which eating, practised
as an art since the beginning of the world,
has attained to the dignity of a science. The
chemists of to-day, rival our cooks in their
culinary operations. The savoury smell of
beef fills all the continental laboratories.
Essays on the chemistry of food issue from
the University at Giessen, teaching the
astonished graduates of the cordon bleu not
to boil their meat, that they may not spoil
their broth. Soyer and Francatelli have taken
lessons of Liebig, Majendie, and others
distinguished in science, and have raised them an
ovation in an omelette. We see already some
results. Young mothers have ceased to starve
their children on arrowroot and sago, since
they have learnt that these belong to the non-
nutritive but heat-giving substances; although
they constitute one half of the food we eat.
Governments, too, whose culinary operations
have generally ended in a pretty kettle of fish,
have been induced to discontinue starving
their armies upon gelatine, and which was
literally giving them bones when they demanded
bread; our convicts are not fattened like
prize cattle, while our sailors go hungry;
nor are our sailors over-nourished when off
work, and badly fed when in active employment.
Catching the hare, and cooking the
hare are the least important parts of our
modern system of gastronomics. We must
know how much carbon the hare contains,
and how much nitrogen; at what
temperature it coagulates, and what is its standard
of digestibility. Such things as these are
seen in a Glasse but darkly, or not at all.
But, in the chemico-culinary works of the
modern masters, they blaze forth in the full
light of day.

The progressive change which has been
worked out in the theory and practice of
dietetics involves our happiness and probable
length of life. For, we may add as a corollary
to the proposition, that a man must eat
that he may live,—he must eat scientifically
and with intelligence, if he would live well.
Chemistry has played the foremost part in
this reform. It was Mulder of Amsterdam
who, like a new Columbus, drew immortality
from an egg, and in crushing its fragile casing,
cracked the shell of obscurity. From the
white of egg he extracted a nitrogenous
substance which he called Proteine (from proteuo,
I am the first). This he proved to lie at the
base of every nutritive article of food. Liebig
followed in his steps; not without vindicating
his claims to greatness, by disputing the
value of Mulder's discovery, and asking him
a question which was repeated all over
Europe, "What is proteine?" The discussion
led to elaborate investigations of the
bearing of this discovery. The results were
startling. The proposition which was
enunciated runs thus:—

Man, they said at first, is made up of air;
and his food is air solidified. He springs
from air, he lives on air; to air he shall
return. The proofs are made out in this
wise:—Man feeds on plants directly; or,
through the mediation of herbivorous
animals; plants feed on carbonic acid gas,
ammonia, and water—which impregnate the
atmosphere. Plants, then, feed on air; and
man also, through the direct mediation of
plants; or, indirectly, through that of the
herbivorous animals he eats. When death
overtakes him, he dissolves into ammonia,
carbonic acid gas, and water; and this again
returns to air. The food which he eats—
compact of the elements of the air—is either
nutritious or heat-giving, according to the
proportion present of one or the other of
the elements of the atmospheric compounds:
nutritive, if nitrogenous; heat-giving, if
carbonaceous; nourishing, if the elements of
ammonia predominate; warming, if it contain
the carbon of carbonic acid in excess.

Four elements, in one firm band,
Give form to earth, and sea, and land.

So sang Schiller, the poet of philosophy. But
this poetic science—not the less exciting it
is to be feared, to some of those who dabbled
in it, because it ranged them in battle array
face to face with the theologist,—leaves half
the story untold. True it is that these four
elements have been hunted down in every form
of Protean change; now gaseous, now fluid,
now solid; entering into endless forms of
existence, and pervading every substance we
examine; as we may see by tracing their
harlequin round of transformations. They
pass into the plant as water, and as the gases
of the atmosphere. By the strange alchemy of
the vegetable cell, they are converted into a
thousand edible substances;* starch, sugar,
gluten, cellulose, and all the other compounds
which make up wheat, potatoes, greens, and
grass. The herbivorous creature, rabbit or
ox, incorporates them with his own flesh and
blood, and prepares them for the use of the
carnivorous feeder, tiger or man. So that

* See Household Words, volume viii. pages 354 and 483.